Category Archives: Political Economy

UPDATE III: Oz Is Alright, Economically (Electorally? Now That's Another Matter)

Debt, Elections, Inflation, Political Economy

PBS reporter Stuart Cohen “thinks” that what has kept Australia’s “unemployment rate just over 5 percent,” and that country’s economy still humming,” is, in part, “government spending”—that has “helped keep Australia out of recession.”

“PETER HARTCHER, political editor, of he Sydney Morning Herald,” believes the same: “The big and searing experience out of this was that, when there was a global financial crisis, and suddenly countries everywhere were in trouble, the Australian government had enough money in the kitty that it was easily able to enact a massive stimulus massive at least in proportion to our economy.

The consequence is one of the only countries in the world that didn’t have a recession. And this experience has now been burnt into the national consciousness, and it’s put a real premium on getting back to surpluses as quickly as possible.”

[SNIP]

HARTCHER’s right about not overspending. Most people outside Washington DC would think of this as stating the obvious. But it is despite the pursuit of porkulus policies that Oz is not looking as bad as the US. The relative prudent financial management of the country’s affairs has meant that the economy can shoulder some Keynesian mischief without buckling under.

UPDATE I (Aug. 21): For those of you who are interested in events outside the USA (not a common occurrence among Americans, in my experience), here is a dispatch from the frontlines of the Australian election. I’ll provide the name of our lively correspondent, whose style you probably recognize, pending his say-so. UPDATE III (Aug. 22): He is no other than R. J. Stove (read his comment and corrections hereunder):

I woke up this morning to the news that yesterday’s election seems to have resulted in a hung parliament (the first at national level since 1940-1943).

The obnoxious Gillard – “Sickening Excuse For A Woman” (SEFAW for short), as Paul Gottfried calls her – has been given a kick in the teeth, but Tony Abbott’s Liberals (despite gains in Queensland and New South Wales) appear unable to form a majority.

It’s the Green party which is cock-a-hoop, with, I believe, nine senators now (as opposed to five previously) and with gains in the House of Reps (where it had lacked any members at all since the
1990s, if memory serves me).

Last night on TV we had the diverting spectacle of Gillard’s vile Environment Minister Penny Wong, who owes her political clout entirely to being a Chinese lesbian, being upbraided by a Greens candidate for “homophobia.” Frankly, to me the Greens are such cartoonish villains that I can’t work up all that much indignation against them.

If we absolutely must have pro-abort, pro-Third-World-immigration and pro-homosexual-“marriage” politicians at all, I prefer them to be outside rather than inside the Catholic Church or “movement conservatism.”

This is some of the latest media coverage of the poll (complete with a recording of Gillard’s cement-mixer speaking
voice).

[SNIP]

UPDATE II: By comparison, “the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits increased by 12,000 to 500,000 last week, taking economists and the White House by surprise. President Obama, on his way to a 10-day vacation with his family on Martha’s Vineyard, said the report underscores the need for”… yes, more government deficit spending.”

UPDATED: Statism Starts With YOU! (Chuckie Misses Bush)

Debt, Economy, Healthcare, Individual Rights, libertarianism, Liberty, Morality, Political Economy, Political Philosophy, Republicans, The State, Welfare

The following is from “Statism Starts With YOU!”, now on WND.Com:

“Why did federal regulators not intervene sooner? A tragedy could have been averted. That was the first demand made following the accidental death of 8 spectators, and the injury of 12, at the California 200 off-road race. The derby was held in the Mojave Desert, in the Lucerne Valley. The driver of one of the racing trucks lost control of his vehicle, flipped and landed on bystanders, who are in the habit of getting as close as they possibly can to the tracks.”

“Evidently, what draws fans of desert racing to the sport, attest Phil Willon and David Zahniser of the Los Angeles Times, is the ‘the danger, dust and noise of watching 3,500-pound trucks roaring past — close enough almost to touch — and then rocketing into the air over treacherous jumps with nicknames like ‘the rock pile.'”

It’s all great fun until something goes terribly wrong. Then it’s someone else’s fault.” …

This tragedy, off-the-beaten-track, well illustrates the dynamics of state encroachment. Statism always and everywhere begins with The People.”

The complete column is “Statism Starts With YOU!”

Read my libertarian manifesto, Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash With A Corrupt Society.

The Second Edition features bonus material and reviews. Get your copy (or copies) now!

UPDATE (Aug. 20): “I miss Bush intensely,” said one of the main Republican ideologues, Charles Krauthammer. “Iraq ended this week fairly successfully. And the economy, Obama purchased with the stimulus; it’s his economy.”

That’s the depth of the thinking of your above-average Republican.

Send Us Your Cameron; We’re Tired Of Our Crazyman

Britain, Debt, Economy, Government, Inflation, Political Economy, Socialism, The State

He has “unveiled 23 bills (and one draft bill) detailing ambitious plans for major reform of schools, welfare, the police and the political system. Every week brings another policy, proposal or white paper,” and all ­aim at “dismantling the British welfare system and rolling back the state; to make changes which … ‘will affect [that country’s] economy, [its] society – indeed, [its] whole way of life.'” He is David Cameron, Britain’s Prime Minister. And he is making the Fabian socialists at the New Statesman furious for not being more like FDR.

The Keynesians at TNS consider Tony Blair and Gordon Brown proponents of the free market. In this essay, the argument for the continuation of deficit spending, state-sector growth and endless stims and bailouts—until the English economic Eden is restored (not)—takes the form of The Complaint. Mehdi Hasan believes that he need not argue his case for the merit of FDR-like government growth, massive public works, regulation of banking and Wall Street, and subsidies for agriculture and labor. These “proven” state initiatives are good on their face.

On the other hand, doesn’t everyone know that living within your means is a dangerous gamble, the province of reckless high rollers?

In his zeal to cut an already falling deficit and “balance the books”, for example, Cameron and his Chancellor, George Osborne, have delivered £40bn of tax rises and public spending cuts on top of the £73bn target they inherited from Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. In the US, cutting the deficit may be a medium-term challenge, but here in the UK, for the Cameron-led coalition, it has become an obsession – “the most urgent issue facing Britain”, according to a letter sent by Cameron and Clegg to their cabinet colleagues on 2 August.
Inside the space of 50 days, and behind the cover of an “emergency” and “unavoidable” Budget, Cameron and Osborne have taken one of the biggest macroeconomic gambles of any prime minister and chancellor to have entered Downing Street.

Hasan takes credit for having warned his homies of the impending austerity.

We cannot say we were not warned. In his speech to the Conservative party conference, in October 2009, Cameron declared that his mission as prime minister would be to tear down so-called big government. The phrase “big government” appeared 14 times in that one speech, in which, studiously ignoring the role played by bankers in causing the worst financial crisis in living memory, he claimed: “It is more government that got us into this mess.”

AND:

“Despite appearances to the contrary, Cameron is less a Whiggish pragmatist than a radical, in the Margaret Thatcher mould. His combination of market-oriented reforms to the public sector and savage cuts to public spending – hailed by the investment bank Seymour Pierce as heralding a ‘golden age of outsourcing’ – suggests that he is intent on completing the neoliberal, state-shrinking revolution that Thatcher began and which Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did little to reverse.”

“Cameron’s right-wing instincts on the economy, however, have never been properly acknowledged by a press pack beguiled by his ‘rebranding’ of the Conservative Party and distracted by his ‘progressive’ stance on gender, sexuality and race issues, [classical-liberal like] as well as his self-professed passion for civil liberties and the environment. …

Disregard the rhetoric and image, and consider instead the record: in his first 100 days, Cameron has gone further than Thatcher – and much faster, too. His ‘modernising’ ally and minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, has said that the Tories always planned to outstrip the Iron Lady.”

[SNIP]

The nation of shopkeepers may soon leave the US in the dust.

Send Us Your Cameron; We're Tired Of Our Crazyman

Britain, Debt, Government, Inflation, Political Economy, Socialism, The State

He has “unveiled 23 bills (and one draft bill) detailing ambitious plans for major reform of schools, welfare, the police and the political system. Every week brings another policy, proposal or white paper,” and all ­aim at “dismantling the British welfare system and rolling back the state; to make changes which … ‘will affect [that country’s] economy, [its] society – indeed, [its] whole way of life.'” He is David Cameron, Britain’s Prime Minister. And he is making the Fabian socialists at the New Statesman furious for not being more like FDR.

The Keynesians at TNS consider Tony Blair and Gordon Brown proponents of the free market. In this essay, the argument for the continuation of deficit spending, state-sector growth and endless stims and bailouts—until the English economic Eden is restored (not)—takes the form of The Complaint. Mehdi Hasan believes that he need not argue his case for the merit of FDR-like government growth, massive public works, regulation of banking and Wall Street, and subsidies for agriculture and labor. These “proven” state initiatives are good on their face.

On the other hand, doesn’t everyone know that living within your means is a dangerous gamble, the province of reckless high rollers?

In his zeal to cut an already falling deficit and “balance the books”, for example, Cameron and his Chancellor, George Osborne, have delivered £40bn of tax rises and public spending cuts on top of the £73bn target they inherited from Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling. In the US, cutting the deficit may be a medium-term challenge, but here in the UK, for the Cameron-led coalition, it has become an obsession – “the most urgent issue facing Britain”, according to a letter sent by Cameron and Clegg to their cabinet colleagues on 2 August.
Inside the space of 50 days, and behind the cover of an “emergency” and “unavoidable” Budget, Cameron and Osborne have taken one of the biggest macroeconomic gambles of any prime minister and chancellor to have entered Downing Street.

Hasan takes credit for having warned his homies of the impending austerity.

We cannot say we were not warned. In his speech to the Conservative party conference, in October 2009, Cameron declared that his mission as prime minister would be to tear down so-called big government. The phrase “big government” appeared 14 times in that one speech, in which, studiously ignoring the role played by bankers in causing the worst financial crisis in living memory, he claimed: “It is more government that got us into this mess.”

AND:

“Despite appearances to the contrary, Cameron is less a Whiggish pragmatist than a radical, in the Margaret Thatcher mould. His combination of market-oriented reforms to the public sector and savage cuts to public spending – hailed by the investment bank Seymour Pierce as heralding a ‘golden age of outsourcing’ – suggests that he is intent on completing the neoliberal, state-shrinking revolution that Thatcher began and which Tony Blair and Gordon Brown did little to reverse.”

“Cameron’s right-wing instincts on the economy, however, have never been properly acknowledged by a press pack beguiled by his ‘rebranding’ of the Conservative Party and distracted by his ‘progressive’ stance on gender, sexuality and race issues, [classical-liberal like] as well as his self-professed passion for civil liberties and the environment. …

Disregard the rhetoric and image, and consider instead the record: in his first 100 days, Cameron has gone further than Thatcher – and much faster, too. His ‘modernising’ ally and minister for the Cabinet Office, Francis Maude, has said that the Tories always planned to outstrip the Iron Lady.”

[SNIP]

The nation of shopkeepers may soon leave the US in the dust.